1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for replicating data of one or more database applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic information has become an integral part of business operations such that many banks, insurance companies, brokerage firms, financial service providers, and a variety of other businesses rely on computer networks to store, manipulate, and display information that is constantly subject to change. Oftentimes, the success or failure of an important transaction may turn on the availability of electronic information that is both accurate and current. Accordingly, businesses seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect and later access the information stored on their computer networks.
Many approaches to protecting data involve creating a copy of the data, such as backing up and/or replicating a database to one or more storage devices. Data shadowing and mirroring, or duplexing, provide for copying but can require lengthy amounts of time, consume valuable processing power and/or occupy large amounts of storage space for large databases. Moreover, such storage management systems can have a significant impact on the source or primary system.
To address these drawbacks, certain storage systems utilize snapshot techniques to preserve a read-only copy of database data. In general, a snapshot records the state of a storage device, database file system, or volume at a certain point in time. That is, the snapshot may be used to provide a point-in-time image of a live storage volume. Additional operations can then be performed using the snapshot copy without affecting the performance of the live volume.
In certain circumstances, however, a snapshot of a database does not necessarily provide easily accessible data. For instance, snapshots of data from a MICROSOFT EXCHANGE database generated while EXCHANGE is online results in a copy of the data that is in a “dirty shutdown” state, which prevents the data from being read or otherwise accessed by standard application programming interfaces (APIs). Although, one option is to shut down EXCHANGE each time a snapshot is to be performed on the database, such an option is not practical as the shutdowns can be time-consuming and costly.